Once upon a time, in the distant past (when there were no electric refrigerators), things were different here.
It was beautiful. There was innocence.
And why is innocence so important? So there you have it, it's critical. Not just important.
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In my years of teaching, I taught marginalized youth, and I often wondered how these wild growths grew. One of the conclusions I came to was that the stage of innocence was missing from the boys' developmental stages.
They were born into a harsh and cruel world. In their immediate environment, people moved around in a state of intoxication, most of them idle, most of them purposeless. Their minds were occupied with planning – how to manipulate the world in order to profit (and always, of course, at someone else's expense).
This was the world that in our pedagogical language is called: environmental backwardness.
These boys have not had innocence since they learned to speak (not all of them knew how to read and write, because in their world they did not need it).
Why is this like: A builder who erects a building, but does not properly prepare the foundations? Without the foundation stage, the building will not stand. It will be a dilapidated structure.
Therefore, once upon a time, a poet could write a simple poem about Shlomit building a tabernacle of peace, because neighbors were neighbors. Hasidism was complete Hasidism. And Lithuanians studying Torah were made of the same material. There was unanimity among all of them. They knew what was important. They strove toward the same goal.
Go and put it on one bench today inside one sukkah, and be as big as you can be, a flag, an eznik, and a haraka.
Did the three of them go together?
Go put a follower of Mandela and a follower of Shrulcha on the French together. The French will simply fall.
Or try putting "Aharonim" with "Zelonim" on the Brooklyn Bridge. The bridge will collapse.
Peace has gone. Unity has gone.
And that's what our youth are mostly lacking. We see gaps in education. More impudence. More cynicism. More audacity.
Our youth lack the stage of innocence. They are born straight into the cauldron, not to mention an election year, when the issue is boiling over.
If we are objects of the future, and if we care about the next generation, we must restore the lost innocence. If not for our own sake – then for the sake of our children and grandchildren – we want a peace pavilion now.
